Notes for 2017/01/06

Today we continue the first stable marriage handout, although we may skip some pieces that you have a good sense of from the reading.

Brief notes on the pre-class quiz: The vast majority of students who took the quiz will earn 2/2. (We’re downweighting the hardest question, which (CORRECTION) just over half of students got correct: “Independent of execution order, with the same preference lists, a particular man always proposes to the exact same number of women.”) Thanks for doing the readings!

Next time, we expect to continue stable marriage but introduce reductions, which we’ll use frequently to relate one problem to another. (We’ll use reductions to solve new problems in terms of old ones. Intriguingly, we’ll also eventually use reductions in the opposite way: to establish that we don’t know how to (or cannot) efficiently solve new problems by relating them to—reducing to them from—old ones.)

Important notes for today:

  • Come to tutorial next week prepared for your tutorial quiz. The collected quizzes will become your assignment. (We’ll post each tutorial’s quiz question as the tutorial ends so everyone can start the assignment at the same time.)
  • Follow along with the worked example in the screencast (and a blank copy of the problem). (Suggestion: print the blank problem and try it, but after each major section or if you’re stuck even briefly, let the screencast help! This is not the way to study for an exam, but it will prepare you for class.)
  • The next pre-class quiz is due by 10PM (CORRECTED!) on 2017/01/08 and will be e-mailed to your ugrad.cs.ubc.ca account by 5PM today. It is about the worked example. (Our normal pre-class quiz pace will be ~1-2 per week, but the start of term is so exciting!!)
  • Also read the syllabus on the course website. Early next week we’ll have a light-weight pre-class quiz about it.

 

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